The morning after the crash was cold.
Waves hissed quietly against the mountain's edge, but everything else felt… wrong.
The rocks were too smooth.
The birds didn't sing.
Even the wind seemed to avoid a certain path along the cliff.
> "This place is alive," Biji murmured.
> "Like, breathing alive?" Tiny asked.
> "Like… remembering things alive."
---
They climbed further.
Yukie complained the whole time.
> "We nearly die at sea, fight a fake crab god, and now we're hiking? My belief system is under protest."
Then they saw it.
A flicker of smoke.
Stone steps, carved by hand.
A small fire pit with still-burning embers.
> "People live here," Biji whispered.
They approached slowly.
Too late.
---
Without warning, a spear struck OTG in the arm.
Yukie barely rolled aside as two more whistled past her head.
Biji caught the fourth midair and snapped it in half like a twig.
From behind the stone trees came masked warriors — fast, silent, shaped by the kind of belief that doesn't need flair, only survival.
They moved as one, shouting nothing.
No threats. No names.
Just coordinated strikes meant to kill.
For a moment, Biji and Tiny hesitated.
Yukie didn't.
> "No one spears my boy-band reject without asking!"
She clapped her hands once — a shockwave of compressed sleep energy burst outward, causing three of the warriors to stumble and fall, twitching.
OTG flipped forward, using his bleeding arm as bait, and knocked two more unconscious with precise joint strikes.
Biji simply stood.
The remaining fighters circled her, cautious. One charged.
She stepped into his momentum.
He collapsed a second later, groaning.
Ten seconds passed.
No more attackers.
---
Then, from behind the trees, they emerged — a village, small and cracked into the rock itself.
People.
Dozens.
Covered in old wrappings and shell-woven cloths. Eyes wide. Children clutching talismans.
No one cheered. No one thanked them.
Only silence.
One older woman, face lined with thousands of years, stepped forward.
> "You don't belong here."
> "We didn't choose to come," Tiny said, holding his wound.
> "The mountain does not care. It remembers those who walk on it. It remembers you three."
> "You attacked us," Yukie muttered.
> "We feared you," the old woman answered calmly. "And fear, in this world, is still belief."
---
The villagers gave them food — not out of kindness, but calculation.
Keep them calm. Keep them watched.
The three were led to an old hut on the edge of the village.
> "Rest. Speak not of your world above. Do not go near the crater."
> "Crater?" Biji asked.
But the old woman had already walked away.
---
That night, as they sat in silence, Tiny muttered:
> "We got beat by a fake crab, ambushed by rock people, and now we're not allowed to walk around because a mountain remembers us?"
> "Seems fair," Yukie mumbled, half-asleep.
Biji looked out the window, toward the distant glow of something hidden behind cliffs.
A faint hum echoed beneath the rock.
The mountain was alive.
And soon, it would wake.
---